Program Development and Delivery

Students at William Rainey Harper College (Harper), a community college in Palatine, Illinois, gain new perspectives on themselves and their place in the world through the lens of a single region. Built on faculty professional development, curriculum innovation, and student mobility, the Global Region of Focus (GRF) initiative offers a three-year cycle of interdisciplinary programs that underpin Harper’s broader internationalization efforts. The first Global Region of Focus, launched in 2014, was East Africa, followed by Latin America in 2017. 

Streamlining Internationalization

In 2010, English professor Richard Johnson was appointed coordinator of Harper’s international studies and programs. He brought in external international education experts to analyze Harper’s existing international programs, which led to the college’s first internationalization plan. “We really needed to think about how we were going to streamline our approach to internationalization,” Johnson says. “Although we did a lot of good work, international [activities] had been pretty haphazard up until that point.” 

The bedrock of Harper’s new internationalization plan is the GRF initiative. Each of the 3 years of the cycle has a different programmatic scope. In the first year, faculty can apply to participate in a professional development seminar with travel to the region of focus, after which they infuse international perspectives into their teaching. In the second year, Harper hosts an international scholar from the region, and, in the third year, students go abroad through faculty-led programs to countries in the region. 

The initiative is funded with support from Provost Judy Marwick’s office. Faculty members are also asked to commit their annual professional development funds toward their participation in the field seminars. In the second and third years of the GRF cycle, the budget is dedicated to supporting the visiting scholar and providing study abroad scholarships for students. 

Developing Faculty Internationalization

According to Johnson, faculty development is at the heart of the GRF initiative. Geography professor Mukila Maitha, who originally comes from Kenya, designed the first international field seminar, which was held in spring 2014. He created the curriculum for a 15-hour graduate-equivalent course for an interdisciplinary cohort involving nine faculty from seven different departments. The group met on campus once a week for 2 months and then spent 2 weeks traveling to Uganda and Rwanda in May and June 2014. 

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Maitha tailored the trip itinerary to appeal to the diverse interests of faculty from multiple disciplines. For example, they visited a museum focused on anthropology and met with urban planners in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Other excursions included a visit to coffee and tea plantations and to a national park. 

“It was interesting having faculty coming from different fields and backgrounds together because people will have totally different takes on the experience,” Maitha says. 

The group visited universities in Kigali and Butare in Rwanda. Participants also spent a day at Makerere University in Uganda meeting with faculty counterparts who shared similar research interests. 

English professor Judi Nitsch, for example, was paired with Susan Kiguli, a Ugandan poet and associate professor of literature at Makerere. Nitsch says she would not have encountered Kiguli’s work if not for the seminar, and it inspired her to work with the Harper library to order fictional literature written by other Ugandan women. 

Similarly, the 2017 Global Region of Focus on Latin America included significant faculty development efforts. Historian David Richmond designed the second faculty seminar in spring 2017. For two weeks in May and June, Richmond led the faculty group to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, visiting archaeological sites, agricultural plantations, a solar farm, national parks, and other locations of historical and cultural significance.

Infusing International Perspectives Across Campus

The goal of the faculty field seminars is for participants to share their international experiences with students and colleagues on the home campus. Since its inception in 2014, the GRF has produced 75 programs and impacted more than 3,200 community college students. Through curriculum infusion projects, presentations, and other events, more than 70 faculty—and 20 percent of full-time professors—have participated in the GRF. 

After participating in the field seminar, faculty are expected to “infuse” the courses they teach with new content stemming from the focus region. “At the end of the process, each faculty member has to come up with [a plan for] what kind of curriculum project they are going to create out of their field experience,” Maitha says.  

“We think it’s important that [our students] be introduced to as much of the world as possible through the lens of their classroom experience,” says President Kenneth Ender.

Nitsch, for instance, revamped a course in non-Western literature to focus on East Africa based on the relationship she developed with her counterpart at Makerere University. “I was able to teach Susan’s work and that of a couple of other contemporary writers, as well as use an anthology of folk writing and nonfiction writing from women across several centuries,” she says. 

According to Richmond, curriculum infusion projects that came out of the field seminar in Central America included the development of a Spanish-English medical component for a radiology class, a unit on liberation theology for a philosophy class, and a unit on Mayan household archaeology. 

Nitsch says that the international field seminars allow faculty who do not necessarily have an international background to gain the necessary expertise. “The seminar gives faculty enough grounding so that they feel like they can present that material. I think it builds confidence,” she says.

Faculty are also expected to do further outreach once they are back on campus and offer presentations for colleagues through Harper’s Academy for Teaching Excellence. “When faculty come back, they are encouraged to act as ambassadors within their department to help other faculty infuse international materials,” Maitha says. 

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Nitsch has organized an annual research symposium that allows students to showcase their work from infused classes. In addition, Harper hosted Jimrex Byamugisha, a lecturer in statistics and economics at Makerere University, as a visiting Fulbright scholar in fall 2015, as part of a program on Africa. During Byamugisha’s semester-long residence at Harper, he gave 22 campus lectures, reaching more than 600 students. 

Encouraging Student Mobility

Byamugisha, who had initially worked with Maitha during the faculty visit to Makerere, also served as a valuable contact in the development of a faculty-led program to Uganda in 2017. Other faculty-led programs included an honors course with an embedded trip to Zimbabwe and a composition course that included a 10-day service-learning trip to Nicaragua. 

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Michele Mabry, a Harper College staff member who completed her associate’s degree in May 2018, traveled with Harper faculty to both Uganda and Nicaragua. “Deciding to participate in the study abroad programs was a big commitment and not an easy task for me, in many ways, but it was so important to me educationally, personally, and professionally,” she says. 

Nora Myer was another participant on the Nicaragua trip, which was the culmination of a semester-long course that encouraged students to reflect on the impact—positive or negative—that service learning might have on the communities with which they interacted. “Our class became exceedingly aware of the importance of reciprocity within service and the significance of knowledge production that starts from the ground up,” she says. 

Drawing on the critical mass of support for campus internationalization that the initiative has generated, Harper is already planning for its next Global Region of Focus, which will be Southeast Asia. Associate Provost Brian Knetl says the overarching goal of the initiative is to create a culture of internationalization that extends beyond the typical twoyear experience for community college students. 

“We are putting all of our efforts and resources into the GRF. It extends everywhere, from the faculty to the curriculum to the students to the programming,” he says. “What we hope happens over those 3 years is that the campus becomes infused with a flavor of that region.”

Harper College

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Stony Brook University’s reach extends far beyond its campus on Long Island, New York. As part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system, Stony Brook has leveraged its position as a public research university to develop strategic partnerships around the world and attract a robust international student population. The university has established research field sites in Madagascar and Kenya and a global campus in Korea, in addition to considerable engagement in China. 

In the last few years, Stony Brook’s administration has invested significant resources in enhancing its comprehensive internationalization agenda. President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. and Provost Michael A. Bernstein have dedicated more than $1 million to support five new staff members in the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) and the development of a new China Center, which aims to boost recruitment and build alumni relations in China. 

Leading the charge for internationalization is Jun Liu, who joined Stony Brook as vice provost of global affairs, dean of international academic programs and services (IAPS), and professor of linguistics in January 2016. As the senior international officer (SIO), Liu oversees the OGA, which encompasses study abroad, visa and immigration services, global partnerships, intensive English programs, and the Institute for Global Studies. 

One of the first things Liu did as SIO was to visit the institution’s main study abroad and international research facilities, as well as spend time getting to know the campus community. “I spent a lot of time understanding what the current global operations were, ...what challenges we were facing, and what... concerns administrators, faculty, and students had in terms of globalizing the campus,” he says. 

Liu created an international advisory board to provide input on the development of a global strategic plan, which helped build a vision for internationalization and streamline Stony Brook’s existing international activities. Some of the recommendations that came out of the strategic planning process included increased campus outreach through a global forum on various international topics and a newsletter promoting international activities on campus. The OGA revamped the website for study abroad programs and created a database of Stony Brook’s international research, partnerships, and initiatives around the world to better track the university’s global engagement.  

“We now have a purposeful strategy to have planned campus internationalization through concrete projects, innovative programs, and engagement of faculty, staff, and students. Meanwhile, we are constantly assessing what we do and adjusting the process,” Liu says.

Fostering an Environment for International Student Success

In response to its growing international student population, Stony Brook has expanded the support services it offers to its international students, which currently make up 23 percent of the total student body, including students on optional practical training. With a 61 percent increase of international students over the past 6 years—from 3,726 in 2011–12 to 5,998 in 2017–18—the university has adopted strategies that focus not only on growing the number of international students, but also on attracting academically talented incoming students through innovative recruitment strategies, such as working directly with high schools and developing alternative admissions criteria, like adding oral interviews and accepting Chinese Gaokao scores. 

In addition to providing a comprehensive orientation staffed by international student ambassadors, Stony Brook offers workshops to help new international students succeed. Trista Yang Lu, coordinator for international student orientation and services, runs iCafe, a coffee house and international student success workshop series. International students are invited to come and discuss topics such as class participation, reading and study skills, networking, and time management. 

To encourage international students to attend, Lu has partnered with the professors who teach first-year seminars. All freshman students are required to attend a first-year seminar within their respective colleges, with the goal of helping them acclimate to the campus community. “As part of the curriculum, students participating in the first-year seminar are required to attend [a certain number of] themed events,” Lu says. “They can attend iCafe to satisfy these requirements.”

iCafe is just one example of the university’s broader focus on international student success. With support from Provost Michael A. Bernstein, and in collaboration with the Division of Undergraduate Education, the OGA launched an international student success task force made up of faculty and staff across all major academic and administrative units intended to identify common challenges to international student success. 

A new initiative aimed at promoting international student success is the Global Summer Institute, a short-term summer program launched in 2017 that allows students planning to enroll at Stony Brook an extended period of adjustment prior to the start of classes in the fall. In the first year, 235 students enrolled, and Stony Brook is hoping to attract similar numbers in summer 2018.

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The Global Summer Institute has three different tracks. Students can (1) participate in an intensive English program; (2) enroll in a three-week certificate program that focuses to getting to know the U.S. culture and educational system; or (3) take academic classes that are part of Stony Brook’s regular summer offerings. 

The Global Summer Institute also serves as a recruitment incentive for students at partner universities who want to experience college life in the United States. The program has helped to deepen relationships in regions of the world where Stony Brook is actively engaged. In 2017, the university partnered with the Malagasy Ministry of Education to sponsor a Malagasy student to attend the Global Summer Institute.

Facilitating Study Abroad Through Faculty-Led Programs

In addition to fostering its international student programs, Stony Brook’s global strategic plan aims to create new and unique educational opportunities abroad. As part of the SUNY system, Stony Brook has become a leader in education abroad among the 64 campuses in New York state. With more than 700 students studying abroad in the 2016–17 academic year, Stony Brook sends more students abroad than any of its SUNY peers. 

Along with the 18 study abroad programs led by Stony Brook faculty, Stony Brook students have access to more than 500 education abroad programs offered through the other SUNY campuses. For programs not directly taught by Stony Brook faculty, the university’s new course articulation database provides a list of preapproved courses at partner institutions. The database eases the process of transferring study abroad credits back to Stony Brook.  

Stony Brook’s first faculty-led study abroad program was launched in the early 1980s by Italian professor Mario Mignone, who has continued to take students to Italy for more than 30 years. In that time, in addition to using its field sites in Kenya and Madagascar to offer specialized education abroad experiences, Stony Brook’s faculty-led programs have expanded to include Russia and Tanzania. One of Stony Brook’s strategies to building a robust education abroad portfolio has been to leverage its international relationships and expand existing programs to other disciplines.

Linguistics professor John Bailyn, who is also the director of the SUNY Russia Programs Network, oversees two summer programs in Russia. “Explore St. Petersburg!” features an extensive cultural program that gives students the chance to become familiar with the city through excursions, films, lectures, and other events. Participants attend courses in cultural and media studies at an international summer school where they interact with students from throughout Russia and Europe, and they also complete an internship. Bailyn also directs the Advanced Critical Language Institute for Russian Immersion, which provides an intensive summer language program.

Research Abroad for Engineers at the Turkana Basin Institute

As the academic affiliate for the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), Stony Brook has been able to expand its study abroad portfolio due to its physical presence in Kenya. Located in a remote part of northwestern Kenya, the TBI is one of the world’s premier paleoanthropology research field stations. The Turkana Basin has been the site of unprecedented fossil and archaeological discoveries that trace back to the origins of human civilization.  

The TBI was the brainchild of Stony Brook professor Richard Leakey, a world-renowned paleoanthropologist who approached the university in 2005 with the idea of creating a permanent infrastructure for yearround research. Stony Brook committed funding to the project, and construction of the two field camps located at Lake Turkana was completed in 2016. 

In addition to serving as a base for researchers from around the world, the TBI hosts a variety of study abroad programs, including a summer and semesterlong Origins Field School where students can earn 15 credits of 300-level coursework in archaeology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and geology.

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Other academic departments have also been able to take advantage of Stony Brook’s presence in Kenya. When Fotis Sotiropoulos, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), joined Stony Brook, he knew he wanted to implement programs that would give engineering students a global perspective. 

Sotiropoulos visited the TBI in March 2017, and by May, he had sent nine students to Kenya as part of the new six-week Global Innovation Field School. Not only was the off-grid construction of the physical infrastructure at the TBI interesting from an engineering perspective, it also gave the CEAS students a chance to visit a truly unique place, Sotiropoulos says. 

During the 2017 and 2018 programs, students worked on projects such as designing a septic system for a rural clinic and cataloging and repairing instruments donated by nongovernmental organizations. Faculty encouraged students to identify more challenging problems that they could bring back to Stony Brook to work on for their senior design course. 

Julian Kingston, who studied engineering at Stony Brook as an undergraduate student, participated in the 2017 Global Innovation Field School as a teaching assistant. He says that the students had to rethink their problem-solving approaches during the experience. “When we first arrived at the TBI facility and connected with the nearby community, the students had a plethora of solutions to everyday ‘problems’ they saw the community having,” he says. “After taking the time to connect with and communicate with the community, the students were surprised to find that the problems they identified—such as moving large loads over long distances—was not an issue for the community. A huge challenge for the students coming in was to put...what they saw as problems to the side in order to listen for what the community actually needed.”

One of the biggest challenges that students discovered was a lack of access to clean water. Available water sources in the Turkana Basin often have high levels of fluoride, which is toxic in large amounts. Two students from the 2017 Global Innovation Field School, Cheng-Wen Hsu and Jacob Marlin, discovered another use for the excess goat bones that they found in this community of goat herders. Hsu and Marlin charred the goat bones using firewood and a tin can to create a charcoal water filter that decreased fluoride levels. 

Hsu and Marlin have since been working with a Stony Brook faculty member to refine the filter as part of their senior capstone project. “[It was] a first step to creating a sustainable filter using minimal materials that could make a difference for the local community long term,” Kingston says. 

Community Outreach in Madagascar Through Centre ValBio

One of Stony Brook’s strategic internationalization priorities is engagement in Madagascar through the Centre ValBio (CVB), a modern research campus located in the rainforest in the southeastern part of the country. Although the island of Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is rich in biodiversity, encompassing a wide range of ecosystems. 

Patricia Wright, a distinguished professor of anthropology and primatologist at Stony Brook, founded the CVB campus in 2003. Wright is known for, among other things, the discovery of a new species of lemurs in the late 1980s. She was also the driving force behind the creation of Ranomafana National Park, the 106,000acre World Heritage site where CVB is located. CVB currently employs 70 Malagasy in the facility’s day-today operations. 

Wright took the first group of Stony Brook students to Madagascar in 1993 as one of the university’s earliest faculty-led programs. She wanted to create a study abroad program for science majors that not only gave them an immersive opportunity to do field work, but also a chance to interact with the local community. Wright continues to take students to Centre ValBio every summer, winter, and fall semester. 

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Ezzeldin Enan, a senior who is double majoring in biology and anthropology, says the program helped him decide that he wants to focus on global health in his future career. “What specifically drew me to the study abroad program was the independent research opportunity in biological anthropology, overseen by... Patricia Wright, as well as full access to an advanced lab facility,” he says. 

CVB is also home to the Global Health Institute (GHI), which promotes health research in the region, in conjunction with a nongovernmental organization dedicated to establishing an evidence-based model health system for Madagascar. The GHI addresses health care issues ranging from trauma and injury prevention to oral health treatments. Since 2005, Stony Brook dental students and faculty have traveled to Madagascar to support efforts to improve the oral health of underserved communities. 

In 2016, CVB launched the world’s first medical delivery drones to transport blood, stool, and tissue samples from remote Malagasy communities to the Centre ValBio research station for quick diagnoses. The drone, designed by Stony Brook alumni Daniel Pepper, is also able to deliver medications to the same communities, which are often cut off from proper health care services due to poor or nonexistent roads. 

Stony Brook’s engagement in Madagascar has allowed the institution to build deeper collaboration with other international partners such as Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) in China. In 2017, for example, two students from SUSTC joined the winter study abroad program at CVB. 

“We encourage and advocate for multilateral partnerships....We share our resources with many international partner universities [by inviting] their students and faculty to participate in the signature programs we have around the world,” says Liu. 

Offering a Stony Brook Degree at SUNY Korea

In 2008, Myung Oh, an alumni who earned a PhD in electrical engineering and served as former deputy prime minister of South Korea, approached Stony Brook about the possibility of opening a global campus in Korea. Following approval by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST), SUNY Korea launched its first four graduate degree programs in 2012 on the Incheon Global Campus, a global education hub established in the high-tech city of Songdo, South Korea. The next year, students enrolled in SUNY Korea’s first undergraduate degree program in technological systems management. The first class graduated in January 2017.

SUNY Korea currently offers four undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 500 students; degree offerings and student numbers are steadily growing. Students are awarded a Stony Brook degree, and all programs require students to spend 1 year on the main campus in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), which is also part of the SUNY system, joined Stony Brook on the SUNY Korea campus in 2017 to offer its programs in fashion design and fashion business management. Huojeong Son, a mathematics major who is planning to graduate in December 2018, says she always wanted to study in the United States. She chose SUNY Korea because it was more affordable than spending 4 years in the United States, but still gave her an opportunity to study abroad. 

Stony Brook hopes to use its physical presence in Korea as a way to establish itself as a global hub in Asia. The institution has worked with the Chinese Ministry of Education and Chinese Embassy in Korea to accredit the campus and boost the enrollment of students from China.  

“Having a global campus enhances our brand and reputation overseas,” says Imin Kao, executive director of SUNY Korea and professor of mechanical engineering. 

Leveraging its physical footprint around the world— from SUNY Korea to the field sites in Africa—and developing more than 160 strategic international partnerships has allowed Stony Brook to raise its profile as a top research institution. Stony Brook’s overall approach to internationalization has been built on developing symbiotic relationships with international partners. “A lot of these programs are enabled by the fact that we are a trusted partner,” says President Stanley. “The more resources you invest in an area, the more people know you are going to deliver. You are not just there to take advantage, you really are making a long-term commitment.”

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During a study abroad program in Italy, Lauren Schwartz took away more than just a deeper appreciation for pasta. She gained a new perspective on the relationship between culture and solution development—an outlook that will no doubt serve her well in her studies and future career. This revelation took place the summer after her freshman year, when Schwartz and 30 other engineering majors visited France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland as part of the Rising Sophomore Abroad Program (RSAP) at Virginia Tech.

“While we were there, we visited the Barilla pasta factory,” Schwartz says. “As a foodie, that was really exciting. And as an industrial engineer, seeing what the production line was like, what kind of safety measures were in place, and what kind of quality control they had was also really interesting.”

At the factory, Schwartz noticed that the packaging of products differs widely between Europe and the United States. Pasta boxes in the United States include a window to show the product to consumers who might not understand the differences in pasta varieties. “In Europe, they wouldn’t even think to put a window on the boxes,” Schwartz says. “But having to design a product that’s different for a global consumer was really eye-opening and kind of captured the essence of what RSAP is about.”

Opening the Window to the World

Virginia Tech’s RSAP currently takes approximately 180 engineering students abroad each year for 2 weeks through several different destinations immediately after the end of their first year of college. The idea, says associate professor David Knight, is to whet students’ appetites for study abroad through a short-term experience early on, with the hope that they will seek out longer programs later in their academic careers. Early assessments seem to indicate a positive correlation; nearly all of the participants in one of the cohorts had at least one additional international experience.

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The program started in 2008 as a Dean’s Signature Program, with 15 students traveling together to Europe. In 2012, the program was moved to the Department of Engineering Education, which serves first-year and transfer students. The department has been able to scale the program from 24 students in 2014 to 180 students in 2018. In 2019, students had the option of taking one of six different tracks: (1) Chile and Argentina; (2) China; (3) Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria; (4) New Zealand and Australia; (5) Spain and Morocco; or (6) the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“The program was created [to offer] a short-term experience for students that would fit in their schedule and curriculum in their first year,” says Nicole Sanderlin, director of global engagement for the College of Engineering. “It was really designed to introduce students very early on to the idea of being a globally engaged engineer and looking at engineering as a global discipline. It’s become a cornerstone of our engineering study abroad opportunities.”

Adopting a Wider Outlook on Global Issues

RSAP is open to all first-year and transfer students in the College of Engineering. In the spring semester, Knight teaches a three-credit course titled “Global STEM Practice: Leadership and Culture,” which involves a two-hour weekly lecture on the types of global problems that engineers face and the various contextual factors that influence their approaches and solutions. “All of the students are in the same three-credit course together at Virginia Tech before they go abroad,” Knight says. “It’s a chance, before you actually go do the international experience, to think across all of the tracks.”

Students then take a track-specific recitation section that is led by a graduate teaching assistant wherein they learn about the language and culture of the countries where they will be traveling. The two-week travel components comprise a series of visits to engineering companies, universities, and cultural sites. Students engage in a sequence of reflective assignments while they are in-country and once they return to the United States so that they can make meaning of their experiences and draw connections to their coursework and development as future engineers.

Bridging the Classroom and Real-World Settings

Doctoral student Kirsten Davis works with Knight to recruit students and arrange the program logistics. She has also served as a teaching assistant in Australia, Spain and Morocco, and the United Kingdom and Ireland. She became interested in RSAP based on her own experience working as an engineer after college. “I traveled to a lot of other countries as a part of my job and I realized that a lot of other engineers weren’t prepared for that aspect of engineering work,” Davis says.

Her observation of a disconnect between engineering education and the realities of the workplace became both the subject of her dissertation and a key part of her work with RSAP.

Davis notes that traveling at the end of the semester helps students to apply what they learned in the classroom. “We talk all semester about how engineering can be different in different places, but then they get there and they finally start to get the picture of why it’s important and why this is relevant to them,” Davis says.

Merging Formal and Informal Learning

Professor Matt James was one of the faculty leaders for a track to Ecuador, Peru, and Chile in 2018. The group visited a wastewater treatment facility in Quito, Ecuador, and a humanitarian nonprofit that is developing a fog net to capture water in Lima, Peru. The students had the chance to examine environmental engineering issues affecting two different communities and their respective solutions.

Throughout the experience, James appreciated the opportunity to get to know the students on a different level. “You really find out what motivates them, what they’re worried about, what excites them, that sort of thing,” he says.

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An important aspect of RSAP is the informal learning that occurs throughout the students’ time abroad. Professor Homero Murzi was one of James’s coleaders on the trip to South America last year. Murzi says that they are intentional about giving students the freedom to make their own decisions when they have downtime. “This is about them becoming experienced travelers, it’s about them finding ways to interact with a new culture,” he says.

Some of that intercultural insight is gleaned before the students even depart campus. Marlena Lester, director of advising, has led students to China and to the United Kingdom and Ireland. To help prepare her first-year students to go abroad, she invited international students to participate in panel discussions on their home countries and cultures. “That seemed to be very beneficial, especially when our students traveled to China last year. They had a lot of questions around technology and access and food,” she says. “It was really good for both the students and the panelists, who talked about the things that we should expect and also the differences and similarities that we might face when we go there.”

Expanding the Education Abroad Student Pool

RSAP has worked to expand access to education abroad programs to underrepresented student groups. The student cohorts participating in RSAP are generally more diverse than the general student population enrolled in the College of Engineering with respect to gender and race. According to Davis, program leaders team up with student organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers to do outreach.

From 2012 to 2014, RSAP also collaborated with faculty at North Carolina A&T State University (N.C. A&T), a historically black university located in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Students from N.C. A&T participated in Virginia Tech’s predeparture class virtually and visited the campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, for 1 week. The two groups of students then traveled abroad together.

The partnership between the institutions ended when the initiating faculty member left Virginia Tech. However, it gave N.C. A&T the experience and push to develop a similar program of its own. “Beyond being a wonderful opportunity to bring students from different institutional environments and backgrounds together in the program, the collaboration was a way for A&T to build its own institutional capacity to support this kind of program,” Knight says.

In 2018, Knight worked with his colleagues in the College of Engineering to secure a grant from the National Science Foundation that provided funding for 26 community college students anticipating transferring to an engineering bachelor’s program at Virginia Tech to participate in RSAP. The community college students, working with their own faculty at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and Virginia Western Community College, interacted with Virginia Tech professors online and then traveled with the Virginia Tech students abroad.

Christian Sorenson, who transfers to Virginia Tech from NOVA in fall 2019, traveled to Europe with RSAP last year. If Sorenson hadn’t been able to participate in RSAP, he wouldn’t have otherwise been able to fit a study abroad program into his aeronautical engineering curriculum. “The big takeaway is seeing how other countries go about solving their problems,” he says. 

The experience also emphasized the need to engage with and learn from other people. “Every day was an exercise in meeting new people and seeing how your perspectives could benefit each other,” Sorenson says.

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Chace Avery’s dedication to Habitat for Humanity began with a study abroad trip to England. While spending a semester at the University of Evansville (UE)’s satellite campus in Harlaxton, England, Avery applied for an international build project in Portugal through Habitat for Humanity International’s Global Village program. Accompanied by Holly Carter, UE’s director of education abroad, Avery and 13 other UE students spent 4 days in Braga, Portugal, working on a house renovation, digging ditches, tying rebar, and laying down a gravel floor. When they weren’t working, Avery and his fellow students spent time with community members to learn about the local culture. “It’s definitely an immersive cultural experience, but you also get to put some hard work in,” he says. 

Serving Community Needs at Home and Internationally

The build project in Portugal was part of the Global Village program, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2019. Global Village offers short-term service trips abroad through Habitat for Humanity that allow volunteers to work side-by-side with local families to build safe, affordable housing. All projects are designed to meet the community needs determined by the local Habitat affiliates. The trips also focus on cultural immersion, with visits to local cultural sites, and foster a sense of global learning and understanding.

Once Avery returned to UE’s main campus in Evansville, Indiana, he wanted to find a way to continue working with Habitat locally. “Had I not had that experience in Portugal, I wouldn’t have had as much empathy with the global community in regard to poverty,” he says. “UE is a pretty philanthropically based institution, so we decided to talk to Habitat in Evansville and just figure out what would help them.”

The outcome of that meeting was a “barn blitz,” where members of the university community came together to build 25 yard barns, which function as outdoor storage sheds, for the local Evansville families served by Habitat. With financial support from the university, UE students, staff, and alumni also built the city’s 499th Habitat house, which was commemorated with a dedication ceremony led by UE President Christopher M. Pietruszkiewicz.

As former president of UE’s campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Avery assisted in organizing a second barn blitz and participated in another international build trip to Mexico through Global Village. He graduated in May 2019 with a degree in biochemistry and starts medical school at Indiana University in the fall— but he will take what he learned from Habitat with him. “I hope that at least a portion of my time post-medical school will be spent in international medicine,” Avery says.

Facilitating Altruistic Education

The University of Evansville’s close collaboration with both the local Habitat for Humanity and the Global Village initiative was spurred by the efforts of Carter, who was UE’s 2018 Changemaker Staff Member of the Year. Carter worked on her first international build in El Salvador in 2009. Since then, she has led more than 30 international builds for Habitat, many of which have included UE students.

Carter helped launch the UE Builds: Local and Global program, which works with both local and international build projects through the Evansville Habitat chapter and through Global Village. Habitat’s Global Village serves as a third-party provider for the international build trips, arranging the in-country logistics.

“I thought the project was perfect for university students, and particularly for UE students. Our students are…globally curious and have a passion for exploration,” Carter says. “So many [UE students] come from backgrounds that have taught them the value of work, so combining this with travel and helping others, they were lined up at my office door to get involved.”
Since launching in spring 2016 with 14 students traveling to Portugal, the UE Builds program has grown to 59 students going on short-term trips to Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, and Romania. Correspondingly, the program’s leadership has expanded from two administrators in spring 2016 to six faculty and administrator leaders today.

Prior to traveling abroad, students enroll in a onecredit course on campus that includes their predeparture orientation. “The course helps the students understand the experience from several different perspectives—both the social sciences and the engineering of the project. We discuss housing, poverty, travel, the actual build project, some of the skills we will use, and expectations,” Carter says.

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Encouraging Skill Set Development

UE’s collaborations with Global Village produce longterm benefits for both the receiving communities and the faculty and students who participate. UE students gain intercultural and practical skill sets that they can apply to their future careers and philanthropic efforts.

Theater professor Chuck Meacham, who specializes in technical production and stage management, initially got involved with local projects in Evansville because, as he puts it, “I know which end of a hammer to use with a nail.” Since Carter was the only person on campus who was certified to lead Global Village trips, Meacham decided to apply for funding to cover the costs of training to become UE’s second trip leader.

Meacham received support from the UE Global Scholars program, which provides awards of up to $4,000 for faculty engaged in scholarship or curriculum development that helps prepare students for global leadership. He traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand, in July 2018 to participate in a Global Village trip and was one of the faculty leaders for UE’s most recent trip to Chacala, Mexico.

As part of the predeparture class for the Mexico trip, Meacham collaborated with civil engineering professor Mark Valenzuela on exercises that teach students building techniques such as pouring concrete. Meacham and Valenzuela used the theater department’s scene shop as a work space to educate students on how to lay cinder block and mix mortar by hand. “Mark can tell us all the things we never knew we needed to know about the ratios of cement to sand and water,” Meacham says. With insights on how they can contribute safely and effectively, students often arrive at the build site with added confidence and develop a deeper appreciation for their role in the project and the value of service-learning.

Many faculty say that participating in a Global Village trip serves as a jumping-off point for students pursuing additional international experiences. Many students have volunteered for multiple international trips upon returning. For example, five of the eight students who went to Nicaragua in 2017 then traveled to Guatemala the next year through another Global Village trip.

Exploring Local Connections

The University of Evansville has collaborated with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity for more than 15 years. Students, faculty, and staff have contributed over 2,500 hours to aid the local organization in Evansville since fall 2017.

The local builds in Evansville and an alternative spring break to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have created prime opportunities for international students studying at UE to volunteer and get to know their peers and meet families in the community, further enhancing their experience in the country.

Adom Kouame, an international student from Côte d’Ivoire, spent her sophomore year spring break helping to build a pool deck for a woman who needed assistance in accessing her swimming pool for physical therapy. On top of learning and working alongside 
other UE students at the project site, Kouame had the chance to engage with local residents in Oak Ridge, visit the museum and other landmarks, and discover more about the city’s history, which was created as the site of a secret nuclear laboratory during World War II. While in Oak Ridge, Kouame was also encouraged to share stories about her own culture, bringing a bit of the Ivory Coast to Tennessee.

Framing Global Perspectives

Drawing connections between the global and the local is one of the most significant student outcomes of the UE Builds program. According to Wesley Milner, executive director of international programs, students are able to explore issues like income inequality and needs assessment by comparing and contrasting the build locations and Evansville.

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Ninety percent of the students who participated in Global Village trips have also worked on local projects in Evansville. “We’ve made this commitment that every time we go and build a house somewhere out in the world, we come back and we do just as much for our local community,” Carter says. 

John East, who graduated from the University of Evansville in 2017 with a degree in civil engineering, has traveled to Nicaragua and Mexico with the program. In addition to his day job as a civil engineer, East serves as an adjunct professor in UE’s Center for Innovation and Change and has teamed up with Valenzuela on a project looking at tiny homes as an affordable housing solution.

“Any opportunities to get involved with Habitat provide a constant reminder of how communities can come together in the fight against poverty. These Habitat experiences act as a source of inspiration for our…project mission…to relieve homelessness in Evansville,” East says.

He adds that “for students, the Habitat experiences help shape their perspective of global situations, as they are able to immerse themselves in communities that are often unlike their own. These moments help develop the perspective of the individual and their understanding as a global citizen.”

University of Evansville

Read more about University of Evansville

As one of the oldest public universities in the United States, Miami University welcomed its first students in 1824. Today, the institution brings a global outlook to its three campuses in southwestern Ohio through its curricular requirements, robust faculty-led programs, study abroad center in Luxembourg, and comprehensive support for international students and scholars.

In October 2018, more than 900 alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Miami University gathered in the Château de Differdange, a fifteenth-century castle located in a village just 20 minutes from Luxembourg City. The event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center (MUDEC), which has served as a study abroad site for Miami students since 1968. 

The center was founded by alumnus John E. Dolibois, who was born in Luxembourg, immigrated to the United States, and enrolled as a student at Miami University in 1938. Shortly after graduation, Dolibois was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He interrogated Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials and later served as a U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. In 1947, he became Miami University’s first full-time alumni secretary. Dolibois took on several more roles at Miami before he was named vice president for university relations in 1981. Throughout his life, Dolibois continued to work to strengthen ties between Miami University and countries such as Luxembourg.

At the 50th Jubilee Celebration, Miami University President Gregory P. Crawford bestowed an honorary degree upon the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg Prince Guillaume, whose father and grandfather had also received the same honor. 
“We have had tremendous support from Differdange and Luxembourg,” says Phyllis Callahan, who retired in July 2019 after serving almost 5 years as provost. “We also have a broad base of extraordinarily devoted alumni who spent time there over the years. It gives us a foothold in a part of the world where there are opportunities for our students to learn.”

The establishment of MUDEC, along with more than 140 faculty-led programs to countries all over the world, has helped Miami University make its mark in the field of international education. Miami’s undergraduate study abroad programs rank among the top five in the nation among public doctoral universities. 

It is a distinction that the institution has held for several years, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors report. The university also hosts more than 3,000 international students every year, and it offers a myriad of curricular and cocurricular opportunities for faculty, students, and staff to engage with the world. 

“The international efforts here are not a single domain of one college or one unit or one department,” says Crawford. “It’s all throughout our culture here at Miami, which is very exciting.”

Nurturing a Culture of Internationalization

At the helm of Miami’s study abroad and international education programs is the Global Initiatives division, directed by Cheryl Young, who serves as assistant provost and senior international officer. While Miami University has a long tradition of international engagement, Global Initiatives is relatively new. The division, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, Ohio, was created in 2013 as part of a strategic reorganization of globally focused academic support units. Then-provost Conrado “Bobby” Gempesaw wanted to centralize the university’s international activities, bringing them together under the Global Initiatives umbrella. The division now oversees study abroad, international student and scholar services, continuing education, the Confucius Institute, and the Center for American and World Cultures (CAWC). 

“Provost Gempesaw asked me to develop a plan for comprehensive internationalization at Miami University,” Young says. “We brought all of these units together with the plan to make sure that we infuse intercultural and global dimensions throughout the university.”

An essential component of Miami’s internationalization efforts is the Global Miami Plan (GMP) for Liberal Education, which outlines a six-credit global perspectives requirement and a three-credit intercultural perspectives requirement that serve as part of the university’s general education courses. Students can take one of more than 80 approved globally focused courses on campus or participate in education abroad. 

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Many students also use study abroad to fulfill their capstone or thematic sequence requirements in the GMP. 

“It is designed to help students understand and creatively transform human culture and society by giving the students the tools to ask questions, examine assumptions, exchange views with others, and become better global citizens,” according to the university website. 

Building on the GMP, Miami recently launched a Global Readiness Certificate that has both academic and cocurricular requirements. Coordinated by the CAWC, the first cohort will be piloted in fall 2019 in the College of Education, Health and Society. Approximately 12 to 15 students will go through the orientation, attend globally focused or multicultural on-campus activities, participate in a community engagement or servicelearning project, complete six credits of off-campus study, and take specific approved courses.

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“A big piece of it is that we don’t want students to just check the boxes. They actually have to reflect on what they’re doing and engage with global opportunities in multiple ways,” says program coordinator Alicia Castillo Shrestha. 

Advancing a Global Vision Through Study Abroad

More than half of all Miami students spend time off campus through study abroad or study away in the United States by the time they graduate. In both the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years, over 2,000 students went abroad. The institution aims to have at least 60 percent of its students study off campus by 2020. The vast majority of students who study abroad participate in one of Miami’s short-term faculty-led programs, which have grown exponentially since the introduction of a winter term in 2014. Most of the university’s faculty-led programs count toward the Global Miami Plan’s global perspectives requirements. 

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Interactive media studies major Brian Velasquez completed a faculty-led program at the University of Calabria in Italy. In addition to a class taught by a Miami faculty member, he took a coding class focused on knowledge representation that was taught by a faculty member from the local university. “I thought that was pretty cool to get a professor with a different teaching style,” Velasquez says. “The coursework was a lot different. Rather than having class two or three times per week, we had class every day,” he adds. “It was an eye-opener to see a different way that people live.”

Velasquez studied abroad immediately after his freshman year, which he says had a huge impact on his personal growth and understanding of different backgrounds. “I definitely look back and appreciate the people that I met because of how far I’ve come socially and professionally in the classroom,” Velasquez says. 

Bolstering Miami University’s Profile in Europe

Approximately 10 percent of all Miami study abroad students travel to MUDEC, which can host up to 120 students per semester and another 40 in the summer. Students stay with host families in the local community and participate in a study tour that takes them to other parts of Europe. 

The majority of courses taught at MUDEC meet the Global Miami Plan’s general education requirements and have a European focus. Each year, two Miami faculty members travel to MUDEC for one semester, and four others teach an eight-week “sprint course,” which entails an accelerated class format and a brief study tour. All other courses are taught by local European adjunct faculty.

While most Miami students studying in Luxembourg take general education courses, some schools and departments have used the opportunity to develop specialized programs for their majors. Miami’s Farmer School of Business, for instance, offers the FSB LUX Plus, a summer business program based at the Luxembourg center that also takes students to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy. Additionally, cohorts of Miami architecture students get the chance to travel to MUDEC where they can take the general education classes offered to all students and then major-specific architecture classes. 

Deepening Community Relations

Miami University’s long-standing engagement in Luxembourg has allowed the institution to develop deep ties with Differdange that go beyond MUDEC. In 2017, Oxford and Differdange signed a sister cities agreement, which has contributed to internationalization on campus and in the surrounding communities. For example, local grocery stores in Oxford stock Bofferding, the leading beer in Luxembourg. The brewery’s chief executive officer Georges Lentz is a Miami University alumnus. 

Over in Luxembourg, École Internationale de Differdange et Esch-Sur-Alzette (EIDE), a local public school that offers curriculum in English, has served as a student teaching site for Miami University teacher candidates for the last 4 years. The majority of students enrolled at EIDE are English language learners (ELLs). “This creates a perfect site for placement of Miami’s teacher education candidates who can improve their ELL teaching skills while also getting an authentic international study abroad experience,” says education professor James Shiveley, who also oversees the MUDEC Curriculum Committee. 

Under Shiveley’s supervision, nine teacher education and special education undergraduates from Miami University planned and ran two weeklong day camps for ELL elementary and middle school students on site in Luxembourg in July 2019. The Miami students, who enrolled in a three-credit course, received free housing from MUDEC. Financial aid for the Miami students was provided by the College of Education Partnership fund and MUDEC, with additional financial support coming from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education and the city of Differdange. 

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Private donations from alumni who studied at MUDEC have also provided scholarships for students from Luxembourg to study in Oxford. Claudia Zaunz, a journalism and English literature double major from Luxembourg, is one of the current recipients. She says she didn’t realize how important Luxembourg’s close connection with Miami University would be until she was on campus. “When I arrived at Miami during orientation, the campus was nearly empty,” she says. “I walked into the Armstrong Student Center and saw the sign: Lux Café. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The windows feature the text of ‘Ons Hémecht,’ the national anthem, and there are pictures on the wall of Luxembourg City…. It made it so much easier to make Miami [my] home away from home! Lux Café is my favorite spot to study for exams.”

Welcoming Students From Around the World

Zaunz is one of approximately 3,000 international students who are currently pursuing their undergraduate education at Miami University. For the last several years, the institution’s investment of time and resources in international undergraduate student recruitment has paid off, growing enrollment numbers from fewer than 500 students in 2009 to over 3,000 in 2018, an increase of more than 500 percent. 

Undergraduate international recruitment is housed in the Office of Admissions, which has four dedicated international recruiters. There were fewer than 100 international undergraduates on campus when Aaron Bixler, senior associate director for international enrollment, started at Miami in 2003. Today, 85 percent of Miami’s 3,000 international students are Chinese. A significant number of students also come from India, Vietnam, South Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. 

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Bixler says that part of Miami’s early success with recruitment in China was because the school quickly expanded to secondary markets outside of Beijing and Shanghai and hired a full-time recruiter based in China. “Having someone there on the ground freed us up a bit to try to explore new markets,” Bixler says. 

Combining Academic and Linguistic Support

To further expand the recruitment pipeline, Miami University established a bridge program in 2011 for international students who are academically qualified but need some extra language support. The American Culture & English (ACE) program, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, offers students with a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) score between 65 and 79 conditional admission. Students in the bridge program take courses in speaking and listening, reading and writing, and social science, as well as an elective that counts toward one of their general education requirements. 

According to director Carol Olausen, the program is built around an intensive advising model that helps students to develop skills for academic success. Xiaoyi Huang, an early childhood education major, shares her experience: “I love the ACE program because it’s not only a smooth transition from China, but it [also] kind of blew my mind because of how English textbooks and daily life conversations are so different.”

Students are also required to participate in a minimum of eight extracurricular events during the semester. “It helps them become comfortable with campus resources,” Olausen explains. Zhuoran Bao, a Chinese student who started in the ACE program, notes, “I had more time to get involved on campus, like volunteering or joining organizations like dance club.” She adds that she met U.S. students through the program, which was important to her as a media and culture major. 

Students who first complete the ACE program have been found to achieve better outcomes than their international peers who did not start in the program. They have a retention rate of 73 percent compared with 68 percent for international students as a whole, according to Olausen. 

The success of the ACE model led to the development of tailored programming for all international students, many of whom struggle with speaking English and listening despite potentially having high TOEFL scores. “Because TOEFL scores often show you more of passive skills rather than productive skills, we identify students through a speaking test administered to all incoming international students,” Olausen says. Students who struggle with speaking and comprehension are automatically placed in a transition course to further develop those skills.

In addition to the ACE program, Miami University has an English Language Center at its Middletown campus, located about 20 miles from Oxford. The center serves approximately 300 students per year, including during the summer. Many students who complete the intensive English program later enroll at Miami as degree-seeking students. The English Language Center also offers a summer program for around 75 English language learners enrolled at local high schools. 

Rewriting the Rules of Language Learning

In 2018, Miami launched the English Language Learner Writing Center, which is coordinated by Larysa Bobrova. She hired 10 consultants who collaborate with multilingual writers and are trained in second language acquisition theories. The idea is not to offer proofreading or editing services, but to help non-native English speakers become more aware of their own writing process. “We discuss strategies that our consultants can use to help students to correct their own errors,” Bobrova says. 

Bobrova also offers training for faculty members in how to design and give feedback on assignments for English language learners. Moreover, education students taking courses in ELL instruction have been able to observe writing consultations at the center to gain skills and insights they can apply to their future careers as educators. 

Like Miami’s overall approach to internationalization, the mission of the multilingual writing center is to be inclusive and welcoming to all students. “Writing persuasively in a language does not imply being a native speaker,” Bobrova says. “This is something that both our students and our faculty need to know in order to make their pedagogy inclusive and to celebrate the diversity of language and cultures.”

A leading research university founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1764, Brown University is known for its open curriculum that allows students to become the architects of their own education. Through its strategic planning, myriad study abroad opportunities, and wide spectrum of international student support services, Brown continues to drive its internationalization agenda forward.

Brown University graduate Nothando Adu-Guyamfi was not the typical education abroad student. “I’m from South Africa, so I always joked that I’m already on study abroad,” she says.

Adu-Guyamfi and 10 classmates from Brown traveled to Ghana in January 2019 as part of a social sciences course, “The African Atlantic Diaspora: Race, Memory, Identity, and Belonging,” taught by professor Shontay Delalue. The course looked at the long-lasting ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade and how they impact questions of race and identity in the United States and abroad. The students visited sites such as the slave castles at Elmina and Cape Coast and tied them back to their own lived experiences. All travel expenses were covered through Brown’s Global Experiential Learning and Teaching (GELT) grant program.

Adu-Guyamfi hadn’t planned on studying abroad when she enrolled at Brown, but she couldn’t pass up the chance to take the course with Delalue, who serves as vice president for institutional equity and diversity. “What drew me to that class was my experience in coming to America as a black person and not necessarily initially understanding the social dynamics of that,” Adu-Guyamfi says.

As a member of Brown’s International Student Advisory Board, Adu-Guyamfi has had conversations with many other students about how their identities, “both those that they acknowledge and recognize and those that are put upon them when they come here,” shape their experience in the United States.

“Understanding my positionality was something that was eye-opening for me,” Adu-Guyamfi says. “The discussions we had and the framework that we were looking at definitely helped me grapple with my time here at Brown and understand what it means to be a black international student.” Adu-Guyamfi’s time abroad and participation in Delalue’s class added additional dimensions to those conversations.

Prior to her current position as chief diversity officer, Delalue served as dean and director of international student experience. Her own experience working in international education and diversity services has helped to elevate the discussion of identity and student experience both in her classroom and across the institution. “I am proud that we are really thinking about internationalization and its intersections with domestic diversity,” Delalue says.

Fostering Internationalization Through Strategic Planning

A focus on identity, inclusion, and the student experience has become a cornerstone of Brown’s global engagement. Internationalization at Brown took on new momentum in 2016 with the launch of Global Brown, a plan that guides the university’s international partnerships, research and curriculum, education abroad programming, and support for international students and scholars.

After becoming provost in 2015, Richard Locke tasked Deputy Provost for Global Engagement and Strategic Initiatives Shankar Prasad with developing an operational blueprint to help integrate a global perspective into the university’s 10-year strategic plan, Building on Distinction. The idea was that internationalization, much like diversity and inclusion, should be integrated into the institution’s strategic priorities.

To accomplish this task, Prasad first wanted to take stock of how the university might better support “Brown in the World” and “The World at Brown,” looking at outbound mobility and engagement abroad as well as the international community that exists on campus in Providence, respectively.

Prasad began by talking to stakeholders across campus to identify areas where there were gaps of support. Those conversations led to both organizational and structural changes. To streamline Brown’s global engagement, various international initiatives were centralized under the Office of Global Engagement (OGE), which reports directly to the provost. The OGE helps to coordinate activities between units such as the Office of International Programs, which oversees education abroad, and the Office of International Student & Scholar Services, which offers immigration support.

The OGE also created a new position focused on international travel safety and security that serves the entire institution. In this role, director Christine Sprovieri has developed a number of policies and procedures to help mitigate risk for student, staff, and faculty travel, and she created an emergency response plan.

In addition to providing resources and hiring more staff to support international students, Brown opened up a dedicated center for the international population. “Students don’t care who reports to whom in this university; they just want to know where to go,” Prasad explains. “So we created a one-stop shop.”

“Most of us still continue to report to different parts of the university, but we make up Global Brown,” he continues. “The idea is that the 40 people who support internationalization, whether that’s going abroad or coming here, are united by this common mission.”

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Tying Partnerships to Strategic Priorities

During the development of the internationalization blueprint, Provost Locke wanted to make sure that Brown’s approach to global partnerships supported the university’s strategic plan. “Brown’s approach to global engagement had been similar to many universities’, and focused on entering a number of MOUs with organizations all over the world,” he says. “We decided to rethink this, undertake a careful review, and continue with the ones that align with Brown’s academic strengths and priorities and have substantive activity taking place.”

Shaira Kochubaeva, associate director for global engagement, oversees all aspects of Brown’s international partnerships to advance its international efforts in the areas of research, teaching, and service. The OGE team has adopted a “less is more” approach by focusing on approximately 75 robust partnerships, the majority of which are concentrated in Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, South Korea, and Spain. Brown also aims to establish more institutional partnerships that encourage a multidisciplinary approach and involve different departments around campus.

One example is Brown’s long-standing relationship with Charles University in the Czech Republic. Starting with a faculty collaboration in Slavic linguistics, the partnership now extends to American studies, applied mathematics, classics, East Asian studies, Egyptology and Assyriology, history, Italian studies, and Slavic studies.

Brown is in the process of planning a new pan-university center for global health that will support research, education, and service in four focus areas: global health and migration/displacement, global health and gender/gender equity, current and emerging epidemics, and global aging. The key values will be to promote health and well-being for all people of all ages around the world; advance social justice, emphasizing equity, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability; and ensure transparency and accountability in all partnerships, local to global, according to Susan Cu-Uvin, director of the current Global Health Initiative. The working committee is led by Susan Short, director of the Population Studies and Training Center.

Leveraging Networks to Expand Study Abroad

One of the outcomes of Brown’s emphasis on productive partnerships is that more than 500 Brown students study outside of the United States each year, facilitated by the Office of International Programs (OIP). Brown-sponsored programs currently operate in 13 countries. The majority of participants spend at least a semester abroad, though Brown also offers short-term programs to Ireland, Italy, Russia, and Spain.

Since 2014, Brown has led the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad (CASA). The group is made up of 12 comprehensive research institutions, including the University of Melbourne in Australia and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Prior to the creation of CASA, a number of the consortium members were running separate programs in the same cities. By working together, they can better attain a “critical mass of students,” says Kendall Brostuen, OIP director.

Another benefit is being able to leverage the partnerships that CASA members have with local universities. At many of CASA’s locations, the strength of the consortium opens doors to learning opportunities beyond the classroom, including internships, community engagement, and undergraduate research.

“We’re able to take advantage of the vast network that our universities have in those locations,” Brostuen explains. “If we are able to pool our resources, it can be much more beneficial for our students, and we can think strategically when it comes to investing in these programs.”

Recent graduate Nicole Comella, who studied public health, took part in the CASA program in Havana, Cuba. “The program is run out of Casa de las Américas, which is essentially one of the most renowned cultural institutions in the city,” she says. “We have classes within the consortium with Cuban professors, and they’re pretty well-known Cuban academics. And then you also have the choice to take classes with the University of Havana.”

Every 5 years, CASA identifies a theme that transcends national boundaries to promote undergraduate research and faculty engagement. “We want to use these institutional relationships on the ground with key partner universities as a catalyst for faculty engagement,” Brostuen says. “To this end, we have opportunities, for example, for faculty and researchers from the partner university to actually carry out research that is funded by the consortium.”

Cultivating Research and Experiential Learning Abroad

During her time abroad, Comella also completed a photojournalism project on the Cuban health care system through Brown’s Global Independent Study Project (GLISP). Students work with a Brown professor to pursue an independent research project, and they receive funding for any local travel that might be required. More than 225 students have undertaken research abroad through GLISP over the last 10 years.

“GLISP encourages students who are going abroad to actually carry out research on a particular theme that they could never explore here in the United States,” Brostuen says. “The purpose of this is really to tie the international experience back to Brown.”

Makedah Hughes participated in a Brown-sponsored program to Paris where she studied comparative literature and French studies at the Sorbonne. Her GLISP project was a comparative analysis of how black identity is expressed in French literature and music. “Personally, I have always been really interested in black identity or Afro-descendants in French spaces,” Hughes says. “It was so hard to do that kind of work here at Brown because there’s just not a large population of francophone black folks here. It was great to be in that community and to make connections like that.” Hughes’s connections from the program also helped her to successfully apply for an English Teaching Assistant Fulbright to France in fall 2019.

In addition to GLISP, Brown has supported faculty and graduate student research abroad through the Global Mobility Grant since 2015. The program provides funding to faculty who seek to conduct short-term research abroad and graduate students who wish to devote a summer or semester conducting pre-dissertation research at an international institution.

A fifth-year PhD student in comparative literature, Edvidge Crucifix used the grant to travel to North Africa and her native France to do archival research. “The grant really was the turning point in my research. It completely changed what I was doing,” she says.

Global studies and reflective cultural awareness are also elements woven into Brown’s executive master’s programs (EMBA) for mid-career adult students. EMBA students study in South Africa and explore the challenge of entrepreneurship in Cape Town’s townships, while students in other programs study comparative international health care systems and learn about corporate science and technology practices in South Korea, according to Karen Sibley, dean of the School of Professional Studies.

Brown also sends students abroad through the GELT program, which embeds a travel component into a longer course. Faculty can apply for a course development grant with the possibility of securing an additional $35,000 to cover travel costs for up to 12 students. GELT course topics have included Delalue’s course on the African Atlantic diaspora and another on the geology of volcanoes in Greece. Since 2014, between three and five faculty have received funding each year.

“When faculty apply to teach GELT courses, we’re looking at how explicit they’re making the learning goals for the course and how the travel component of the course can actually help students achieve those learning goals,” explains Sarah Mullen, chief of staff and assistant director of curricular programs in the College. Brown is distinctively known as a University-College, with undergraduate education based in the College.

In addition to the many ways in which Brown undergraduates are inspired to study abroad, Brown’s pre-college program offers multiple study abroad opportunities each summer, demonstrating the value placed on global experience to prospective Brown undergraduates.

Supporting International Students Through the Global Brown Center

Global Brown also focuses heavily on the international community on campus. Seventeen percent of the university’s 7,000 undergraduates are international. At the graduate level, 42 percent of master’s students and more than half of doctoral students come from abroad. The top sending countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and Turkey.

Supporting international students and scholars at Brown is part of President Christina Paxson’s vision for comprehensive internationalization. “One of Brown’s greatest strengths is our diverse, global community. We value the more than 2,000 international students and scholars who are essential to our university. And the ideas, experiences, and perspectives they bring are critical to our capacity to engage in teaching, research, and service with excellence and distinction,” Paxson says. “We are committed to attracting the most talented and promising students and scholars from all countries of origin, cultures, races, religions, identities, and experiences, and to cultivating an environment that ensures the free exchange of ideas and advancement of knowledge.”

That commitment begins with open, ongoing dialogue with international students about their goals and needs. In her former position as dean of international student experience, Delalue spent much of her time talking to international students about what they really needed from the university. “A big part of my responsibility was to assess the landscape and really help the senior-level administration understand what would be needed to best support international students,” Delalue says.

She created the International Student Advisory Board as a forum for international students to share their experiences and concerns. One of their recommendations was to reserve a dedicated space on campus for the international population. Students also expressed a clear need for more academic and extracurricular support.

In response, the Global Brown Center for International Students (GBC) was established under campus life in May 2017. Several months later, Brown opened the Global Brown Lounge, known as “the Globe,” which provides a physical space for international students. The GBC has the same status as other affinity centers on campus such as the Brown Center for Students of Color, the LGBTQ Center, and the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender. Any student who identifies as international— including students with immigrant backgrounds and U.S. citizens who grew up abroad—is welcome.

Former GBC program director Christina Bonnell, along with a staff of 12 students, ran a mentoring program and planned orientation and other programming for international students. The GBC currently works with 40 internationally focused student organizations.

Ramisa Fariha, a biomedical engineering master’s student from Bangladesh, works in the GBC as a community fellow responsible for organizing events for international graduate students. She is also a member of the International Student Advisory Board. “Being a part of the advisory board is really cool because you’re actually involved with identifying problems pertaining to international students,” she says.

Fariha has coordinated events such as a healthy meal prep night led by a former international student who now runs her own start-up company. “We’re always cooped up in our labs or doing research, so we need a few social events,” Fariha says.

Designing Programming for International Student Success

In support of the international community, Brown created academic dean positions to serve as advisers to both international undergraduate and graduate students. Part of the rationale for the new positions was that “no student should come here and feel like they have no idea how to navigate the college experience,” Prasad says.

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Some international undergraduates, for example, might need help in understanding Brown’s open curriculum, which means that there are no core curriculum or distribution requirements that students must complete in order to graduate. Students are able to choose the classes that most interest them and, in some cases, design their own major, known as a “concentration” at Brown.

As the associate dean for international undergraduate students, Asabe Poloma has focused on identifying some of the academic barriers and challenges preventing international students from thriving. She has started conversations with faculty and advising deans about culturally relevant pedagogy and inclusive advising practices and worked with the campus career center, CareerLAB, to bring attention to professional development for international students.

“We try to approach all of our programming with the intention of thinking about the international student identity and experience as an asset,” Poloma says.

Divya Mehta, a former international student and Brown graduate, was hired as the first international student career coordinator. Working with Poloma, she co-organized an annual undergraduate career conference and helped connect international students with Brown alumni. “This year, we had alumni from several different fields and industries come in to create a first step to mentorship, but also have the opportunity for students to understand what their career trajectory could look like,” says Mehta, who recently left her position to attend graduate school at London School of Economics.

Creating Spaces for International Graduate Students

The international graduate student population at Brown has grown rapidly over the last decade in tandem with the expansion of its master’s programs. Because Brown as an institution is largely focused on undergraduate teaching, international graduate students advocated for a dedicated support person for their particular needs.

Coming out of the Global Brown strategic planning process, “we knew we needed someone to be the point person for international grad students,” says Shayna Kessel, the associate dean of master’s education and interim associate dean for international graduate students.

The international graduate students “were using these undergraduate resources to try to resolve housing issues, tax issues, social issues, and nobody really knew what to do for them,” she adds.

As the associate dean of master’s education, Kessel was already serving as the primary adviser for many of Brown’s international graduate students. So it made sense to appoint her as the point person for international graduate students. “What we’ve taken away from me being in this position for a year is that there has to be a physical connection between the Graduate School and Global Brown,” she says.

Third-year PhD student Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza has been the chair of international advocacy on the Graduate Student Council for the last 2 years. She says the biggest part of her job has been asking how new policies and programs might impact international graduate students. “There’s usually a very easy solution to include international grad students. It’s just that no one else had thought about it,” she says.

Brunau-Zaragoza worked closely with Bonnell at the Global Brown Center to revamp the international graduate student orientation. “We got rid of as much of possible of the academic structure,” she says.

A concrete example of the changes that Kessel has been able to make is allowing graduate students to have their degrees conferred at multiple points during the year. Students were staying in Providence longer than they needed to because they were unable to get jobs at home without a physical diploma. Brown turned out to be the only Ivy League institution that only conferred degrees once a year.

“Just knowing international graduate student needs and being able to do something about it, and having really receptive administrators, has been really important,” Kessel says.

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